epic-game posts

Two of the biggest game developers on the planet are announcing a big team up today at the Game Developers Conference. Epic Games has announced that game studios who license Unreal Engine 3 from them will now have native support for Valve's Steamworks series of tools built into the engine, free of charge.

Unreal Engine 3 is already one of the most licensed game engines for developers to use. Putting in native support for Steamworks, which include things like auto-updating, Steam achievements, leaderboards, and more, will certainly expand the use of Valve's development tools by third-party games. One wonders how Microsoft, with its own rival Games For Windows Live suite of tools, feels about this new move by Epic and Valve.

Update: Epic has also announced that Unreal Engine 3 will now have native support for Nvidia's 3D Vision technology. This includes users of the free Unreal Development Kit.

Download Unreal Development Kit March 2010 Beta (548 MB)
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Bestselling author Orson Scott Card has won an endless array of awards for his Ender's Game novels. His most recent endeavor, Empire, was a smash hit based on a video game concept from Epic Games-owned Chair Entertainment. The second novel in that trilogy, Hidden Empire, hits bookstores next month. The recent Xbox Live Arcade game Shadow Complex is a prequel to these new sci-fi novels that focus on a modern day Civil War between the red and the blue states.

In this exclusive interview, Card took some time away from working on the screenplay for Paramount Pictures big screen adaption of Ender's Game to talk about his love of video games and his own personal dream game project. After all, Card ended up working on his newest trilogy because of a relationship that grew from his first video game work on Advent Rising (developed by the founders of Chair Entertainment when they worked at GlyphX Games).